


As Is the Osprey to the Fish

by Gileonnen



Category: Coriolanus - Shakespeare
Genre: Complicated Mother Feelings, Difficulty Processing Emotions, Fishing Metaphors, Gen, spy AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 17:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1612625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You have the brief. I want no wetwork in this campaign. We don't need another Corioli to spin." When Volumnia needs information about the Volscian Movement's illegal arms trade, she gives her son a mission that makes him question his loyalty to her--and to Rome. Spy AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Is the Osprey to the Fish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/gifts).



> Italy has had a number of different governments since its unification, and almost as many intelligence agencies. The ones mentioned in this fic are the AISI and the AISE, which are the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Interna (internal or domestic intelligence) and the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna (foreign and military intelligence). They (respectively) replaced the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica (SISDE) and the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI). Because this is not Real Italy but rather Fantasy Spy AU Italy, I have played fast and loose with their organization, policies, and procedures. The goal here was to capture the aesthetic of the spy genre, not to depict Italian intelligence agencies accurately.

She casts him out into the world like a fishing line, a silver hook gleaming at the end. Volumnia is a skilled angler, a woman who knows well how to read the hidden currents of the water and how to choose the most tempting bait. When she stands at the monitors in HQ, arms akimbo, expression shuttered and cold as she waits for a bite, she is patience itself.

Martius is a damn sharp hook, and he's never cared much for metaphors. He always comes back to her bloodied, and that's what matters.

This time, Volumnia wants information. "You have the brief. I want no wetwork in this campaign," she tells him, with a significant glance over her shoulder at the wall of framed newspaper clippings. "We don't need another Corioli to spin. If it gets ugly, you aren't in our employ. I have your termination paperwork already signed and filed, and it doesn't leave our records until the job is complete."

"Always good to see you looking out for me, Mother." _Are those records falsified, too?_ he wonders idly, but even he knows that's not a question. Blood is blood, except when it's a liability. There will be a woman somewhere, well paid to keep his baby pictures and service photos on the walls and to claim when necessary that he was her misguided son. "I'm not the right agent for this one. I'm telling you that right now. I'm not human intelligence; I can't be another person for a job."

"We don't need you to be another person. You're the only man we have with a contact among the Volsces. You can leverage that--"

"He knows who I am. Who I work for." Martius glances down at the leather-upholstered chair across from his mother's, counts the brass studs around the rim of the seat from force of habit. (Forty-three. It only takes a moment, after all these years.) "He'll see right through me if I go to him asking for information."

"And that's why you won't go to him asking for information. Read the brief." Volumnia slides the brief across the desk again. The manila folder is stamped with the date and the mission ID, just slightly shy of parallel with each other. The misalignment makes some irrational part of Martius twitch. _Intentional?_ With his mother, so many things are.

Her eyes are as calm as a millpond as she says, "You'll go to him demanding my head."

* * *

The brief calls the Volsces a paramilitary separatist group, reactionary in its politics and conventional in its tactics. They do not seek nuclear arms or biochemical weapons; they do not have religious links to other organizations. They had managed a few high-profile occupations of public buildings in the last decade, with limited casualties and no fatalities, but that was a domestic issue. The AISI's business.

The Agenzia Informazione e Sicurezza Esterna hadn't taken an interest until they'd found that the Volsces were sourcing their guns from Afghani warlords. And for reasons that didn't much concern Martius Martius, that made them accessories to global terrorism.

He'd met a few Volsces, back in his college days. Even gone to some rallies with them, back when they were just a fringe party and not a paramilitary group. They'd had a lot of damn good things to say about why the economy had been in the shitter for the last century, and they were mostly pretty savvy about their military history, but that hadn't been what kept him coming back.

There was something about the men and women of the Volscian Movement that he couldn't name--they seemed really and fully alive in a way that no one else did; they burned with purpose and clarity, with a passionate sense of honor and dignity that made those empty abstracts comprehensible for the first time in his life. He saw the Volsces stalking the pavement like lions, hands slicing the air with every call for liberation, and he thought, _Now I know what honor looks like. Now I've seen it in the flesh._

The Volsces don't hold rallies anymore. Now, they hold hostages.

Martius has occasionally had to kill a few of them, back when he worked for Menenius Agrippa and the SISDE. Sometimes more than a few. His mother still has the paper framed from the 2006 disaster. **Volscian terrorists destroy their own in Corioli Tower bloodbath** , the headline reads. Underneath that, **5-day occupation of corporate center ends with 26 dead.**

He looks that lie in the face every time he goes to her office, and every time, he feels queasy. Not because the deaths are on his conscience, or even because it dishonors their memory. Not because he wants to be recognized or credited; he knows himself well enough to know that he couldn't stand the glare of the spotlight.

That's all: he knows himself, and he knows what he did, and he feels that the record should reflect it.

* * *

There's no good way to call up a terrorist and arrange a meeting. There's no directory for their numbers or addresses--they don't tend to have those, anyway. What they have are contacts, arms dealers and moles and minor bureaucrats who can be persuaded to look the other way. Spies of their own, in the homes of the powerful: nannies, maids, groundskeepers.

It's his own mother's housekeeper who eventually leads Martius to his "contact." When he stalks out of the expensive sliver of a townhouse that his mother calls home, threatening to leak the AISE's secrets to the highest bidder, he knows that the housekeeper is watching and assessing him. She is a heavyset woman with cunning eyes and a proud way of holding her chin; there is nothing servile about her.

"There's a whole world of agencies who'd kill to know what I know!" he shouts, if there is hatred in his voice, it is at least half hatred of the falsehood.

"The AISE is one of them," his mother answers, unperturbed. "Think on that."

"You'd terminate your own fucking son--"

"I have no son," she says. She is a thing of ice and razorwire, implacable as the northern wind.

He could tell himself that she's playacting, too, but he knows her too well for that.

"You will never find me," he tells her.

"I know you, boy. I'll just have to follow the trail of blood to your bolt-hole."

"Call me _boy_ again, and I'll--" He can't finish that sentence; in that moment, he is sure that he _would_ do whatever it is he's on the very point of articulating, he _would_ do something that can never be undone.

Instead, he draws back a fist and shatters the glass on the photograph over the credenza. The picture shows the skyline of Rome at night, beautiful and impersonal. It is, he thinks, the only photo in the house that depicts something that Volumnia loves.

When he pulls back his fist, there are shards of glass in it. The thick, glossy paper of the photo has distorted in the shape of his hand.

Three hours later, a heavyset woman passes him in the street. She says nothing, and he doesn't feel her shoulder brush his, but when he checks his pockets he finds a slip of paper inside one of them.

* * *

"They say I stand before the butcher of Corioli Tower," says no less than Tullus Aufidius, ranking general of the Volscian Movement. With his Volscian fatigues, he wears a scarf checked like a kaffiyeh. It makes him look more like a hipster than anything else, dolled up in Islamist drag to shock the unwary. In his hands, the AK-47 looks no more threatening than a stage prop. "Are the rumors true?"

Martius has had a lifetime's education in not rising to the bait, and he has never felt the slightest inclination to use it. "You know who I am," he answers sharply.

"I know only what you tell me." There is something of the orator in Aufidius's demeanor, in how he cocks back his shoulders with his arms spread a hair too wide to be spontaneous. Martius can imagine him standing head and shoulders over a crowd of college students, shouting about a free Volscia and private property. (He can almost, but not quite, imagine him in a soldier's battle dress.)

"My name is Caius Maritus. I was in the AISE. The SISDE before that."

All around him, he can feel the Volsces tensing. They have excellent trigger discipline, even the youngest of them, but he can imagine all too clearly what it will feel like when their assault rifles tear him apart.

He thinks he likes that feeling.

"Was, you say," prompts Aufidius.

"Was," Martius agrees. "Until my own mother terminated me and sent men to kill me."

"Can anyone confirm this?" asks Aufidius, and two Volsces immediately answer, "I can." Only one of them is an AISE plant; the other, Martius almost remembers from the service. She was a paratrooper, or a combat engineer, or something like that--a specialist. He can't remember her name, and he suddenly wishes he could.

She can't know that she's helping to bait the hook. She probably thinks she's just helping out a fellow-soldier.

_If it gets ugly, you aren't in our employ._ A part of him has always known this, but for the first time, the pain of it is keen.

"So, my Volsces," says Martius softly. "How would you like to help me take down my mother?"


End file.
